


One More Time, With Feeling

by lookninjas



Series: Children's Work [22]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-09 23:55:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13492494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookninjas/pseuds/lookninjas
Summary: In the days following Leia's death, Ben learns how to carry on.





	One More Time, With Feeling

He tells her, “It’s okay.”

He tells her, “We’ll carry it for you.”

He tells her, “You can let go,” and “We’ll pick it up,” and “We’ll carry it for you,” and “We’ll carry it as far as we can.”

He feels the weight slip from her hands. He feels it settle on his shoulders, the weight of the world on his shoulders and it’s almost comforting, like a last touch, like her hands settling on his shoulders for just a moment before -- finally light, finally free -- she drifts up and through and away, where the weight cannot follow.

The soft quiet noise in the back of his mind that was _hers_ goes silent again.

This time, it stays silent.

 

*

 

The worst part is, he’d almost finally convinced himself that he was normal. That it had all been in his head, not just the parts that Snoke put there, not just the things he’d made up to keep himself safe, but all of it. Poe, Rey, all of it. It was him, only him, always him, and it was so comforting, in its way. To be normal. To let it all go.

Then something in the back of his mind went silent, a soft sound that had been going on for so long that he’d forgotten it was there, if he ever knew. If he ever realized he’d been hearing it. It went silent, and then it started back up, but it wasn’t the same, and he knew.

And even though he told himself he didn’t have time to deal with it, even though there were so many more important things to think about, it always came back in the quiet moments, and there were far too many of those in the last days.

He is not normal. He will never be normal.

He just wishes he knew _why_.

 

*

 

There’s something he likes about the small hospital chapel.

It doesn’t feel closer to God, exactly. God is everywhere; God is nowhere; God is in him, somewhere, like a soft sound he has heard so long that he is only very rarely aware that he can hear it at all. God is in everyone around him, which might be the truest one and is something he should talk to Rabbi Alana about, when he is capable of talking again. But there is something about the hospital chapel that quiets him down, and he has always sought that quiet.

The only problem is that Luke is down there again, and Luke --

But the paradoxical thing about the silence that his mother left behind is that everything else has become so _loud_ , as if to make up for it, as if to fill in the gaps. It’s too much. The chapel will be quiet, and he can catch his breath, and then -- Then the weight. Then his promises.

He’s already so tired.

When Poe kisses him on the cheek and tells him “Go. I’ll wait for you by the car,” he goes.

He reaches the chapel just as Luke is leaving it -- there’s another man with him, a man with a familiar weight, but all Ben can see is Luke’s swollen eyes and Luke’s red, crumpled face and Luke’s grief and Luke is the only other person in the whole world who has never been alive without her. They learned to breathe together, just like Ben learned to breathe from the sound of her lungs, that soft sound always in his mind, and now she’s gone and they both have to --

Luke raises his head. He reaches out.

Ben goes.

Luke’s hands on his arms, his hands on Luke’s shoulders, their foreheads tipped together and it hurts. Because Luke always thought Ben would be like him, and Ben always thought Luke -- but they aren’t, they’re themselves, and it isn’t how they were supposed to be, and it hurts to be this close and this far. Luke never quite understanding. Ben, who can’t quite make himself understood.

So they don’t try to talk -- they just stand, together, in the silence she left behind.

 

*

 

He just feels so small.

At the same time, he should be smaller than he is. Not much, but enough to fit better in Poe’s arms, to hide himself more. The way he is now, he overflows. Legs too long, shoulders too broad. Ears sticking out too far. If he were smaller, things would be easier.

If he were bigger, if he were _more_ , it wouldn’t matter how hard things were.

His mother is small. Was small. _Is_ \--

But she was vast, too.

_We’ll carry it for you_.

It just seems so impossible.

Poe’s fingers work their way into his hair. Ben’s eyes sting.

“I don’t know where to start, Poe,” he says. “There’s so much… I don’t know where to start anymore.”

He should know; that’s the worst of it. What the hell is the good of knowing anything else, if he doesn’t know this?

He’s crying again. Poe’s arms tighten around him.

“We’ll figure it out,” Poe says. “I’m with you, okay? I’m here. I’m with you. I’m not going anywhere. No matter what. I’m right here, with you. That doesn’t change. I’m here. I’m here.”

If, one day, he isn’t. If something happens. There’s no way Poe isn’t part of the quiet chorus in the back of Ben’s mind. If something happens to him, Ben will know, and he’ll be every bit as helpless as he is right now, and that --

“I’m here,” Poe says. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here --”

Ben finally falls asleep with his ear pressed to Poe’s chest, Poe’s voice humming through him.

_I’m here, I’m here, I’m here_.

 

*

 

Mornings were hers.

His dad owned the afternoons -- ants on a log, or sometimes grilled cheese. Cookies, when Han was in a particular sort of mood. But the early mornings, the dark and the quiet of the sleeping house, those were hers.

The day after she lets go, Ben wakes up at 4:47, disentangles himself from Poe’s arms, and goes downstairs to find his father sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of black coffee in his hands.

It isn’t a surprise.

He pulls up a chair, rests his head on his father’s shoulder, and listens.

Han sighs. He reaches up, ruffles Ben’s hair, lets his hand fall back down again.

He sounds like tires on gravel, Ben thinks.

Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe that’s just what Ben wants him to sound like.

But maybe he does.

Ben listens, and lets himself drift.

 

*

 

He wonders if it’s snowing in Cross Village.

It should be. It’s almost snowing here. Trying to snow. A single white flake here, another one there. Nothing that will stick, but. It’s trying.

It doesn’t really snow down here, that much. He’d forgotten about that. It’s different up north. Comes in heavy off the lake. He hated driving, that first year. Tried not to if he could help it. All that snow.

He got used to it, in the end.

Isn’t that how it always goes? You get used to it, in the end. Right before it changes.

Rey squeezes his hand. Another snowflake falls.

They can’t go back, not really. There’s too much work for them here, especially now.

He still wishes they could, sometimes. He knows she does too.

He presses his cheek to her hair.

They’re burying Leia tomorrow.

“I talked to Holdo again today,” Rey says, soft, words freezing in the air. “I’m gonna do the speech. At the March; I’m going to -- I don’t know what I’m going to say, yet. But I’m doing the speech for her.”

Ben blinks. There’s a flicker of something, almost a memory -- Rey’s brown hair, a crowd, his mother’s face in the distance -- but it doesn’t make enough sense to worry about, so he doesn’t. There’s the more pressing problem of the tightness in his throat, cutting off everything he ought to be saying, like “Thank you,” and “Congratulations,” and “You’re amazing.”

Rey’s arms wrap around his waist. “You’re not carrying it alone, you know,” she says. “You never were.”

That was the promise, wasn’t it? _We’ll carry it_. Not _I. We._

“Oh,” he manages, finally.

“I wouldn’t let you,” she adds, and his arms fall around her, hold her close.

After all this time, Rey is still the best miracle God ever showed him.

“I know you wouldn’t,” he says. “I know.”

 

*

 

“It’s funny,” Hux says. He smells of cigarette ash; there’s a smudge of dirt on the cuff of his shirt. His eyes are red, swollen. “He was almost right about us, you know. The details, he was right. It was just everything else he got wrong.”

The part where Ben could kill a man. The part where Hux would let him. The part where Ben could turn his back on Hux; the part where Hux wouldn’t notice or care if he did.

And now Hux will shoulder his corner of Leia’s burden -- Hux will run for her seat and he’ll win, and he’ll be good at it. He’s brilliant, he’s terrifically compelling when he wants to be… Tough and driven and everything a politician should be. Everything Snoke always said he was.

Snoke said Ben was a prophet, and that -- that sits less comfortably now than it ever has. Anyway, the world doesn’t need more prophets. Everyone’s a prophet these days. Everyone sees the sky is falling.

“ _Was_ he right?” Ben asks, and Hux shakes his head, smiles into his glass.

“You tell me,” he says. “Mr. ‘I’m Getting Married On Inauguration Day,’ you tell me.”

Ben blinks at him. Stares. Feels, for a moment, that he has suddenly found himself on the wrong side of the table, that they’ve switched roles without anyone warning him.

Hux’s smile widens fractionally. He goes on.

“I always fucking hated it, you know. You on that chair behind him, like a prop. So every time he needed to make absolutely sure we all bought it, what he was selling, he’d point to you and say, ‘The Prophet Kylo Ren has shown to me --’ and everyone would look at you and you hated it; I knew you hated it, all those eyes. But I guess it’s different, now. When it’s up to you, when you actually get to speak for yourself. I always did wonder what you’d say, if he let you talk for a change. Guess now I know why he didn’t.”

He did hate it, everyone looking at him. He didn’t at first, but the more he did it, the worse it got. He still can’t make it connect somehow, start to finish; what his presence in Meetings has to do with his wedding now. “I’m sorry, Hux, I don’t --”

Hux puts the glass down, leans forward, rests a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “You were his proof,” he says. “Anytime we thought for a second that the world might not be ending, he’d point to you and say ‘Kylo Ren has foreseen it,’ and we’d all believe. I mean, they’d believe. I never really did. But everyone else looked at you, and went ‘All right. I guess it’s true.’ And now you’re out here proving that it isn’t ending. That it’s still worth fighting for, and good things can happen in it. Weddings and all that. And hopefully people will look at you again, and think, ‘All right. I guess it’s true.’ And you’ll convince them. Look, I haven’t really been sleeping lately; it gives you a lot of time to think. So I’ve thought about it a lot. And I’m pretty sure I’m right. I usually am.”

Ben tries to laugh at that; the best he can manage is a huffing sound. It sounds really reassuring in a way that Hux usually isn’t. In a way that Ben maybe isn’t ready for, yet.

“It’s all right,” Hux says, and tips their foreheads together. “You’ll figure it out eventually. I have faith.”

“As long as one of us does,” Ben says, and closes his eyes, and tries to believe.

Hux’s hand settles on the back of his neck to keep him in place, as though Ben would ever willingly let go again.

 

*

 

There are so many things Ben wants to ask, to know. Things Chirrut might even be able to answer. He’s never had answers so close before. There’s so much he could ask.

What he settles on, finally, is, “I still don’t feel… sure. Of any of it. I don’t --”

Which isn’t even really a question, but Chirrut answers as though it is. “You won’t,” he says, calmly, and rests a hand on Ben’s arm. “You will, in the moment. When it’s time to act, you’ll feel sure. But the doubt always comes back. You just carry it better, over the years.”

It shouldn’t be comforting. It is, somehow, anyway.

“As long as you don't try to carry it alone,” Chirrut adds, tipping his head in Ben’s direction, and Ben almost laughs.

As if he could. As if anyone would let him.

“I won't,” he promises, just in case Chirrut doesn't already know. “I won't.”

**Author's Note:**

> I opted to stick with Regina Spektor for the title -- it just fit better -- but the kick that finished this story for me was Dessa's video for [Good Grief](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMVA2TY4fFE), and if you really wanna make yourself sad, that's a winner.


End file.
